Aspects of the Privatization of Public Education

Education should be a public service for quite possibly the simplest reason imaginable. Every single person who lives in a society is demonstrably better off on literally all metrics when every single person has access to the highest quality education possible.

Arguments against education as a public service are either massively ill informed or purely agenda driven. There are three agenda types that stand to profit from the privatization of education. They are not mutually exclusive, in fact there can be much overlap. These agenda types are:

Profit driven agenda

Ideology driven agenda

Control driven agenda

The profit driven agenda seeks to benefit financially from privatizing an education system. For instance, if a public system was primarily funded by tax dollars, the move to privatize that system might seek to allow for those tax dollars to flow to private institutions instead of mandating that the tax dollars be used in the public institutions. Hence, taking money away from the public system.

The Ideology driven agenda seeks to promote a particular ideology through the education system. Public education systems are intended to promote a broad yet strict definition of education. In order to accomplish this, public systems base their curriculum on historical and scientific facts. This solid foundation is needed to ensure that all participants in the system have the same “starting point” and that as much intellectual sound territory can be covered as possible. The ideology agenda disregards the importance of a foundation based on facts and instead would use a foundation based on the tenets of a particular ideology.

The control driven agenda seeks to control participants in the education system through myriad methods. As a public education system seeks inclusion of all historic and scientific facts, a private control driven system might seek to exclude those facts that would not line up with it’s agenda. By excluding certain information or including information that is not proper, the control driven agenda would be able to influence the system participants. Propaganda would be an example of this functionality.